Think Sgt. Bergdahl Should Have Rotted in Afghanistan? Think Again

Not long after the September 11 attacks, a tap on my shoulder awoke me in the middle of the night. I rolled out of my sleeping bag and walked out of the mud hut to do my business in the putrid pit dug into the ground out back. The sky was a cloudless wonder, a million stars—a billion?—illuminating the looming Hindu Kush to the southeast.

Haroon, who had awakened me, was waiting in the driver’s seat of the Russian-made Gaz. I had hired Haroon as my fixer and translator for $40 a day. He said he was 19. He looked 12. Somewhere far to the west 500-pound bombs, dropped from the bay of an American B-52, were finding their targets. With each muffled blast the ground vibrated beneath my feet, sending a mild jolt up through the soles of my boots that gently shook my innards.

We drove for maybe an hour, the lights from the dusty village of Khodja Bahauddin fading in the distance, until we reached a small hillock. We parked the Gaz at the base of the rise and monkey-walked to the crest of Chagatai Ridge. We crawled into a dugout, where another boy with a wispy mustache and an AK-47 peered over the lip of the trench and pointed to a facing ridgeline perhaps 200 yards away. “Talib,” he said. He smiled. His white teeth gleamed in the starlight.

Haroon jutted his chin toward the hand-held radio laying in the dirt, and his compatriot turned it on and fiddled with the dial until he found the frequency he wanted. The radio emitted chatter, in Urdu, and the fighter handed the radio to Haroon. Haroon whispered something into the mouthpiece. The words were foreign to me; the menace was not. Still talking into the radio, Haroon repeated his threat in English for my benefit.

“Talib, tonight you die. Talib, tonight we slit your throat.”

A voice, also a whisper, floated back to us over the airwaves. Haroon and his friend grinned. “They say, no, tonight we die. Tonight they slit our throats.”

I asked Haroon what would happen if he happened to fall into the hands of the Taliban. He drew his index finger across his throat. “No prisoners,” he said.And if he or his compatriots in the Northern Alliance should ever have the good fortune of capturing a Taliban fighter? “No prisoners,” he repeated, and again drew his finger across his throat.

“But …,” I said, and stopped. Haroon looked at me as if I was an idiot. Of course no prisoners.

Which brings me to Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl. It is rather obvious the Taliban kept Bergdahl alive as a bargaining chip, and released him as such. But unlike those smarter than me, I usually need a week or so to process the complexities of a tale like the sergeant’s. So I have come to the conclusion that the raging criticism directed at Bowe Bergdahl by Washington’s weekend warriors and chickenhawks is shameful.

Just yesterday it came to light that Bergdahl’s Taliban captors had locked him in a metal shark cage in total darkness for weeks, and possibly months, and beat him often as punishment for at least one escape attempt, and perhaps two. Who knows what else they did to him. More, I bet.

In response to these tortures I cannot help but wonder how the chattering class, which is labeling him a deserter, a collaborator, a traitor, and worse—one Fox Network commentator suggested that it would have been more appropriate for Bergdahl to have come home in a body bag—might have reacted to such depravations. Might have wondered, when is my country coming to get me? Just as, over the past dozen years, I could not help but wonder why all the laptop warriors cheerleading for the deaths of other people’s children had failed to enlist themselves or their sons to fight the war on terror with boots on the ground. Forgetfulness, I suppose.

All United States soldiers, airmen, sailors, and Marines are familiar with the tenets of what the services call the SERE manual—Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape. In this manual, the serviceman’s Code of Conduct is spelled out explicitly in case of capture or detainment. It is a serviceman’s or servicewoman’s duty to try to escape their captors. Thus, the manual reads, “The individual must be expected to adhere to both the spirit and the intent of the Code of Conduct to the full extent of their physical, mental, and moral resources.”

Yet the authors of the SERE manual also realize that American warriors are human. So its rules also take into account the truly extraordinary circumstances of capture by an enemy when it adds, “Failure to live up to the full extent of the Code of Conduct obligations while captured or detained is not a criminal offense. It is recognized that inhuman treatment and the application of psychological techniques have succeeded in individual cases in forcing involuntary departures from the standards set forth by the Code and can be expected to do so in the future.”

Yesterday, when I spoke to a US Air Force instructor who teaches a SERE course to pilots, he was sympathetic to Bergdahl’s plight. “We can’t control the physical conditions, the torture and such,” he said. “But we do try to teach that in order to keep your sanity, particularly over years on end, we drill it into our airmen to concentrate on the things that are closest to them. Wives, children, parents, your God if you believe. To stay alive for them. Anything that will keep you from despairing, from going mad. In the case of prisoners of war, love of country is pretty far down on the list. It’s like they say in combat, you don’t fight for the flag, you fight for the guy in the foxhole next to you. Same with being in captivity; you gotta keep it as personal as possible.”

We spoke for a bit about camaraderie, about how when prisoners are held together in one place, even in hellholes as despairing as North Vietnam’s infamous Tiger Cages, they can at least try to depend upon one another to keep their spirits up. Such was not the case with Bowe Bergdahl, a lonely prisoner in the loneliest and most benighted place on the planet.

By all accounts Bergdahl was close to his father Bob, who let his beard grow in solidarity with his son during the five years he was in captivity. Now the FBI reports that the Bergdahl family has received multiple death threats. I am sure this has nothing to do with the pundits accusing the elder Bergdahl of “looking like a Muslim.” Who’s next? ZZ Top. The Duck Dynasts? “I don’t know the story with this particular guy,” the SERE instructor told me. “But I think I speak for a lot of soldiers when I tell you that I am just glad he is home. If he did something wrong the Army investigators will sort it out and take the proper procedures. But there is another thing in the manual that we really stress, that means all kinds of morale to anyone who fights for this country.”

I knew exactly which passage he meant. It is the one that reads, “No American prisoner of war will be forgotten by the United States. Every available means will be employed by our government to establish contact with, to support and to obtain the release of all prisoners of war.”

I do not know if Bowe Bergdahl was a deserter, a collaborator, a traitor. Neither do you. As the SERE instructor suggests, I will leave that to Army investigators. All I know is that our country did exactly what our military Code of Conduct mandates. They brought Bowe Bergdahl home. It is something that we all should be proud of.

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